Beilin: "Ask me if I am at peace with this, I’ll tell you no. What is 100% sure? I also have numerous questions. I do not sleep well at night. The greatest test of this agreement will be the test of blood."

Tirosh: “Meaning?”

Beilin: “The test will take place over the ensuing months and year or two after the Gaza Strip and Jericho become autonomous, and a Palestinian police force is installed. This is a charged period of time. If, heaven forbid, a reasonable period of time elapses and terror cannot be vanquished, the Palestinians cannot claim: we cannot fight terror from Tunis. We don’t have a police force”.

Tirosh: “Then what?”

Beilin: “We won’t have a choice but to retract. If the level of violence does not decline, we cannot move ahead and definitely cannot implement the permanent agreement. If we have no choice, the IDF will return to the locations that it is about to withdraw from over the next several months”.

"What if they take whatever we give them and demand even more, still exercising violence and terror? Within the proposed settlement, Israel will be in a position to close in on Palestine and undo the deal. If the worse comes to the worst, if it turns out that the peace is no peace, it will always be militarily easier for Israel to break the backbone of a tiny, demilitarized Palestinian entity than to go on and on breaking the backbones of eight-year-old stone-throwing Palestinians.

"Once peace comes, Israeli doves, more than other Israelis, must assume a clear-cut 'hawkish' attitude concerning the duty of the future Palestinian regime to live by the letter and the spirit of its obligations. The plan now being negotiated, Gaza and Jericho first, is a sober and reasonable option. If the Palestinians want to hold onto Gaza and Jericho, eventually assuming power in other parts of the occupied territories, they will have to prove to us, to themselves and to the whole world, that they have abandoned violence and terror, that they are capable of suppressing their fanatics, that they are renouncing the destructive Palestinian Charter and withdrawing from what they used to call 'the right of return.' They will also have to show that they are willing to tolerate in their midst a minority of Israelis who may choose to live where there is no Israeli government."

Peace has not come, and the Palestinians control much more than Gaza and Jericho, but Israeli doves such as Oz and Beilin continue to blame Israel for the situation, despite promising that they would support retraction of Oslo and the IDF's return to Judea and Samaria if violence continued.